


Once/Maybe/Always

by Sarai



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Canon Compliant, Inej is reunited with her parents, Minor Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa, Post-Book 2: Crooked Kingdom, hints of kanej but mostly a family fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 18:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19950619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarai/pseuds/Sarai
Summary: Picking up where Chapter 44 left off, Inej and her parents begin to catch up to one another, and she shows them the more presentable side of Ketterdam... but the presentable side of Ketterdam doesn't explain the past few years.Really, though. Do those years need to be explained? Would her parents understand?





	Once/Maybe/Always

_When Inej Ghafa was seven years old, a stray cat wound its way between her legs, rubbing her ankles, bopping its head on her toes. Inej was used to cats. They often approached, then stopped several feet away and mewled for scraps. How had this one come so close?  
  
The caravan had stopped for the evening and Inej was gathering kindling for the fire. There were villages nearby, but not so close that a cat this well cared for would wander. It must have belonged to a farm. That explained its friendliness, but to Inej, the cat was not a friend but a fascination._

* * *

  
  
They all cried.  
  
When Inej first saw her parents again, she had been happy with an edge of disbelief. By the time she reached the berth where their ship had docked, she had been almost delirious. Now that she was in their arms, she wept. She felt her mama shaking, heard her father’s soft sobs. Beyond the little group, Ketterdam harbor continued, muttering and bustling, the salt tang of the air and the chill breeze, and she didn’t care, she didn’t, not even a little. She wasn’t worried about an attack or thinking of the next score. She was just here in her parents’ embrace and safe and loved.  
  
“Inej,” her papa said, disbelieving. He placed his hand on her hair.  
  
“Meja,” her mama said.  
  
It brought a fresh wave of tears to her eyes. She never thought she would hear that again. In a way, her parents never left her. She heard their voices in her mind all these years. They were with her, urging her, helping her survive. In a far more real way, she hadn’t fully believed she would ever see them again, feel them holding her close, smell the hints of the rosemary sprigs her mama liked to tuck amongst their clothes. Rosemary. She had almost forgotten…  
  
“Inej, you’re here.”  
  
She felt the impossibility of it, too.  
  
“I love you,” she said.  
  
“We love you, too.”  
  
“I love you.”  
  
“Shh,” her mama soothed. “There will be time. We have plenty of time now.”  
  
For a few minutes, she stopped being the Wraith, or a Dreg at all. She wasn’t sixteen years old, she had never been to Fjerda or to Kerch, she had never been glad to bleed on someone’s shirt. For a few minutes, she was fourteen-year-old Inej Ghafa, a safe little girl who knew nothing of the cruelties this world held.  
  
Eventually she stepped back and really looked at her parents. They were older than she remembered, with deeper lines by their eyes and silver streaks in their hair. Her mother’s usually smooth braid was frayed. She recognized her father’s eyes, dark like hers, and her mother’s smile. She recognized _them_ , even if her heart swelled with so much happiness it told her brain this must be a dream.

* * *

  
  
_Seven-year-old Inej set her kindling down and crouched so low the bottom of her braid trailed in the dirt. She barely noticed as she studied the cat’s paws, hypnotized. She watched its legs, the way it bent and straightened, and how it set its paws one by one so tidily on the ground. She watched until the cat realized there would be no scraps or pets from this tiny human, that it had approached in the guise of a needy supplicant only to be greeted as a teacher. Deeming the activity useless, the cat gave a dissatisfied mrow and ran off.  
  
Inej stretched out her legs, sore from crouching so long in the dirt, and began to walk._

* * *

  
  
Someone nearby cleared their throat, and with the nudge against her arm Inej remembered Kaz and, with him, the past two and a half years. She glanced down and saw he was offering her a handkerchief. Trust Kaz to ruin the moment with optics. Nonetheless, she did need it, so Inej accept the handkerchief—their fingers brush, just the slightest bit—and dried her eyes and mopped her nose.  
  
“Mama, Papa, this is Kaz.”  
  
“Hello,” Kaz said grimly with a nod. He had his hands folded on the crow’s head of his cane. His tie was perfectly straight.  
  
Her parents returned the nod, then gave Inej curious looks.  
  
“Kaz is my friend.” How strange that sentence felt! Inej thought of the kindnesses inside his cruelties. She remembered the sheer terror and determination on his face the day he tied her bandages. Kaz Brekker was strange and frightening creature, but he was nonetheless her friend. “He’s helped me,” she added.  
  
“I never helped you,” Kaz replied, his voice its usual low rasp, but with something unfamiliar in it. “I simply created opportunities for you to help yourself.”  
  
Was he… teasing her? Inej searched Kaz’s face for any hint of mirth—but if it was teasing, it was teasing of Kaz’s making, and he was more skilled at making trouble than jokes.  
  
Inej shook her head.  
  
She translated for her parents, whose Kerch was good enough for haggling but not negotiation, and said, “Don’t mind him. Come, we’ll go…”  
  
Where, precisely? Not the Slat, she didn’t want her parents seeing the Barrel—at least not first. Let them see her in Ketterdam’s respectable quarters. It would be their first impression of their daughter’s time here, and she preferred it to reflect her life now rather than the nightmares of the past.  
  
She wondered what people did who did not have so many secrets did keep. What would Jesper—  
  
Question answered.  
  
“Waffles?” Inej suggested.  
  
“Someone’s been a bad influence on you,” Kaz said.  
  
Someone who was missed, she thought—around the Slat.  
  
Maybe he wasn’t ready to openly talk about their friends too much.  
  
Maybe, Inej thought, he missed Jesper more than Jesper missed him, and it made her feel for Kaz. Not that he would ever admit it, but he did need people, friends, not just underlings. Inej and Jesper had been Dregs, but they had also, out of stubbornness or blindness, made themselves Kaz’s friends. Jesper had his demons to wrestle yet, but he had Wylan by his side, the two of them so happy sometimes it made her ache. Wylan left the Barrel with his innocence at least partly intact because Kaz preserved it. Jesper simply seemed immune to the Barrel’s true nature; he always found something to play at, to enjoy. Now they had each other. Who did Kaz have?  
  
They exchanged a stilted conversation over breakfast.  
  
Inej was grateful for Kaz’s presence, grateful for her parents but also trying to postpone the moment she had to tell them what had happened. With Kaz, they traded pleasantries—the journey to Kerch had been very pleasant, yes; why, he was a Kerch businessman, nothing more; no, Inej did not know why King Nikolai was persuaded to find her parents and put them on a ship to Kerch. The last was true. She had spent as little time as possible with the Triumvirate members and Sturmhond. Just how much influence did the privateer have? What had Kaz traded to him for this?  
  
Saints, and she had been ready to end things. How wrongly she had read him! There was so much good here, so much to be grateful for. Her parents—her perfect, wonderful, loving parents. Kaz, how hard he tried. But there were things to worry about, too, a future, a past to be addressed. She felt like she was balancing now on a wire, where she felt the most comfortable, where she felt weightless and free. All she must do was balance the future before her and the past behind her, and she could walk like a girl made of air forever…

* * *

  
_  
Walking cat-like is easy for a cat. It comes less naturally to a human. Inej put down her left arm out first, setting down her makeshift paw of a palm and curled knuckles. Then, ordered just like her unwitting feline tutor, she moved her right leg, her right arm, her left leg... she was not a cat. Her four ‘legs’ tangled at first. They were unequal, as well, and stretching her limbs cat-like made her bottom stick up.  
  
Inej practiced and practiced. She practiced until she took first one set of steps, then two, until she had learned to distribute her weight, to keep her ‘paws’ still and lift them slowly. She practiced until the world turned grayish as the sun sank.  
  
Then she straightened, human again.  
  
“Mama?” Inej asked, looking around. “Papa?”_

* * *

  
  
She directed them after breakfast.  
  
“There’s a park,” Inej said, “just at the edge of the University District.”  
  
There was a park, at the edge of the University District. It was the place that felt the least like Ketterdam, the least Kerch. She had seen another side of Ketterdam the past few weeks. She had seen a Ketterdam that moved slower and stayed cleaner. Though to her mind it was only a misleading veneer over the truth of the city, it was a pleasant veneer.   
  
A hill in the park looked over the canal, close enough to hear the boatmen call to each other, far enough away that it sounded almost quaint. Inej knew they were really being… brutally direct. But from far away, it sounded nicer than all of that.  
  
Kaz was gone by the time they reached the park. She wasn’t surprised—he wasn’t one for goodbyes. Not that it had been a goodbye. She had felt his fingers, his skin against hers, and from Kaz that was huge. That was even more than finding her parents. Inej knew the depth of the wounds he had been hiding, how vulnerable he had made himself to her. They had so much yet to do, Dirtyhands and the Wraith, so much work ahead. Slavers to catch. But for now they could be Kaz and Inej. Just themselves, for now.  
  
“Have you been well, Inej?” her mama asked.  
  
Inej sat between her parents, her mama’s hand in hers, her papa’s arm around her shoulders.  
  
“Don’t ask me yet, Mama,” Inej implored.  
  
Often she had been well, but rarely had she been good. The things she did to survive… could she do her penance for them before needing to admit to her parents what sins she carried?  
  
“Tell me about home. Tell me about the others.”  
  
Her parents shared a glance over her head. Inej felt the heaviness of the years between them. Though she also felt her mama and papa beside her, solid and safe and warm, she felt the time pushing them apart.  
  
“Hanzi has married,” her papa began. He launched into a story about her cousin’s wife, who was pregnant now and expected to deliver in two or three months. She was a dancer, he explained, who whirled and spun an absolute beauty of motion. If she returned, Inej thought, perhaps she could learn to dance from Hanzi’s wife.  
  
Her parents told her how their act had evolved. Inej knew it had changed in part because she was gone. Her absence was so loudly absent, but no one mentioned it, not openly. They told her about some of the goings-on in Ravka and how that had impacted their family.  
  
For hours, Inej’s parents spoke about home. They spoke in Suli. It was the first time Inej held a conversation in her own language in years, the familiar words stirring something inside her. It might have been the safety of her parents beside her or the comfort of speaking Suli. Whatever it was, something put Inej at ease.

* * *

  
  
_Inej had come across a field and passed through a copse of trees. There had been a stream, but she wasn’t certain now if she had crossed it or decided against that…  
  
She raised her head and sniffed the air until she caught the scent of smoke. That was the right direction, then. Her first footsteps sent up a cacophony of snaps and clatters. Inej frowned. She did not like her clumsy human walk when just moments ago she had been a silent cat! She settled back on all fours. Now she was not a half-lost Suli girl but a brave, adventuring Suli girl, one who could contend with any creature in the darkness!_

* * *

  
  
She didn’t know how it happened.  
  
Somehow, hours passed.  
  
She was half-asleep between her parents and the shadows had lengthened.  
  
“We need to find a hotel,” her mama said. “The guidebook recommends the Ostrich—”  
  
“You can stay with me,” Inej said.  
  
The Ostrich.  
  
Why did that sound familiar? She knew they had never run a job there—as Kaz always said, an honest man can’t be fleeced, and one of the reasons the Ostrich made the guidebooks was that it was honestly run.  
  
“I’ve been staying with a friend,” she explained, “but he won’t mind.”  
  
Her parents shared another look, another unspoken sentence. Inej had forgotten how they did that. She grew up watching them speak their own private language, one only the two of them knew, and dreaming of the day she and another built a private language of their own.  
  
Her papa shook his head. “We wouldn’t impose.”  
  
What he meant, she knew, was that it was not the way of the Suli. Being a people without a country, they were wary of owing a debt. They felt a keen need for self-reliance, or at least, reliance on their own people. Being Suli was not unlike being in a gang, in some ways, an insular group made that way by the danger of outsiders—whether those outsiders were the Dime Lions or the Ravkan government.  
  
“It’s all right, Papa. We’ve sheltered under the same eaves.”  
  
They had been together in the prison laundry, in the tank, in the clock tower. They had worked the same jobs. They had suffered the custody of the same man.  
  
There could be no debt between them.  
  
Inej had not been unaware of the distance she had climbed in just a few years. She hadn’t been unaware that she had gone from living as a slave in all but name to being one of the most feared spies in the Barrel to being a guest in a mansion on Geldstraat. It had never been her goal to conquer this city but… she had done it nonetheless.  
  
It sank in as she led her parents up to the front door, but Inej couldn’t worry about that now. Slow and happy from her day in the park and gleeful all over again at the thought of introducing her parents to Jesper and Wylan, she was all but giggling.  
  
“Your friend lives here?” her mama asked. Inej couldn’t tell if she sounded surprised, impressed, or confused.  
  
“He does,” Inej confirmed, letting them all in—through the front door again. “Jesper!” she shouted. “Wylan!”  
  
It wasn’t how Inej behaved, normally. She simply appeared in the room, perhaps knocking if she were feeling especially generous. Today, Inej sang out loud and clear. Today, she wasn’t hiding, even a bit.  
  
She didn’t want to leave her parents just waiting. She checked the sitting room, but they weren’t there. Probably the office, if they were still indoors; they might be outside. Rather than go looking, she called out again.  
  
“Jesper! Wylan!”  
  
Each of them was capable of being quiet as need be, and none of them had to anymore. Jesper and Wylan came down the stairs like a mildly furious thunderstorm. She saw them taking in the sight of two strangers with familiar faces, two Suli adults who looked like Inej…  
  
Inej nodded.  
  
She noticed Wylan’s reaction first, his face lighting up before he pulled her into a hug. It seemed Inej wasn’t the only one influenced by Jesper! She returned the hug. Maybe because she had seen it coming, it was okay—Wylan was less clumsy than he had been before, but he was still slower than any real fighter, and he didn’t register as an intimidating figure. Inej felt like he was slow enough that she had time to agree to the hug.  
  
Besides, she appreciated him being so overtly happy for her. It was the only thing she could possibly want right now: more joy.

* * *

  
  
_Alternating between cat-walking and human-walking, and occasionally pausing to seek out that scent of woodsmoke and reassess her direction, Inej picked her way back toward the wagons. Soon enough she saw the flicker of flame through the trees, heard voices, though she was too busy focusing on her quiet walking to pay much mind to the words. So adept was her cat-walk that Inej crept into the camp just as the cat had crept up to her, unseen until she leapt with a mrow!, jumping at her papa.  
  
“What the—where have you been? We were about to come looking for you!”  
  
“I’m a cat, Papa!”  
  
Her mama laughed. “You’re a mess,” she corrected.  
  
“I’m a cat,” Inej replied, indignant as her mama plucked her from her papa’s arms._

* * *

  
  
Inej was padding down the hallway when she heard her name. After a day of catching up, showing around, and translating, she was looking forward to sleeping, to waking up tomorrow and spending a full day knowing her parents were here. She was just on her way to the guest room where they would be staying, to say good night. For the first time in years, she was going to say good night to her parents, not just in her head but with them here to say it in return.  
  
Maybe, if they were ready, she could tell them some part of the truth.  
  
“Inej.”  
  
She stopped, quickly frustrated—she wanted to get back to her parents!—but she turned to him, smoothing her face to neutrality.  
  
“If you want me to come with you, I will,” he said.  
  
Inej’s initial reaction was confusion. Why would she want that? She liked Wylan well enough, had come to think of him as a friend, but she was going to be with her parents. Her _family_.  
  
Wylan continued, “Or I’m sure Jesper would, we know you have… difficult things to say.”  
  
Oh.  
  
Now she understood—and he was right. Inej knew she had to tell her parents the truth, to take a breath and face her sins. She knew her friends saw the things she had done as strength. Since her actions saved their lives, it was difficult to fault them. They were necessary sins, the only way to survive a world built on sin was to master at least one avenue within it, but that did not justify them. A part of her wanted to accept Wyan’s offer. She had to face what she had done and would rather not face it alone—but she needed to.  
  
Maybe she didn’t need to have this conversation tonight. Would it hurt, one more day of her parents believing their daughter’s spirit survived Ketterdam unbroken?  
  
“Thank you, but I’ll be all right.”  
  
“Okay. You know where we are if you need anything.”  
  
“I know. Good night, Wylan.”  
  
“Good night, Sankta.”  
  
When he first called her that, first told her that he saw her as a future saint, Inej had been touched and humbled, and though she disagreed, she had not taken his faith from him. Everyone deserved faith. Hadn’t she kept faith in Kaz for years, even as he fought to prove her highest hopes untrue? Hadn’t that faith shown to be well founded? But she did feel especially far from holy now.  
  
Inej walked silent down the corridor. She didn’t know what to expect from her parents. When she imagined them all these months, she imagined them understanding. Now she faced the reality of them. What if they didn’t understand? Today, in the park, she had been their daughter again. It had felt so good and safe and right.  
  
“Sankt Petyr, Sankta Alina, Sankta Marya, Sankta Anastasia, Sankt Vladimir, Sankta Lizabeta…”  
  
What did she ask of them? _Protect me, protect me…_

* * *

  
  
_Being denied her cathood was not the only indignity Inej suffered that evening. There was also the indignity of having her face, arms, and legs scrubbed with a warm, wet cloth (she was not a mess she was a cat!), and the indignity of her cousin Asha tugging playfully on her braid (never pull a cat’s tail!).  
  
That night, Inej lay awake in the darkness, practicing, moving her limbs: left arm, right leg, right arm, left leg, left arm…  
  
“Inej,” her mama said sleepily, “what are you doing?”  
  
“I’m a cat, Mama.”  
  
Inej’s mama shook her head and got up to tuck the blankets tight around Inej.  
  
“Whatever you are,” she said, “you are my daughter, and my daughter knows when it’s time to sleep.”  
  
The indignity! But she did feel a soothing warmth now… and she had tired herself out with her cat-walk… maybe Inej, brave Suli adventurer and silent cat of a girl, could stand to close her eyes for a few minutes…_

* * *

  
  
Inej knocked on the door.  
  
“Mama, Papa, it’s Inej.”  
  
As soon as she said it, she realized how _Kerch_ she had become. In the caravan, there was no knocking—there were no doors to knock on. With a wince at how alien she was from her own family, she opened the door.  
  
Her parents looked so strange here, so out of place. They sat together on the edge of the bed. She had heard their soft voices through the door and saw their concerned, puzzled faces. None of this was right. What would a couple of Suli acrobats be doing in this opulent mercher’s mansion? What, for that matter, was a pair of loving parents doing in the Van Eck home?  
  
They made space. She sat between them on the bed.  
  
“Inej,” her mama murmured, stroking her hair. It was comforting, but Inej felt the discomfort yet to come, the difficult questions they had to ask.  
  
She looked from her mother to her father to her hands. For years, they waited. They must have imagined every terrible possible thing had happened to her. They were right. What they had not imagined were the terrible things she had done.  
  
“We don’t understand why you wouldn’t come back to us,” her papa said.  
  
“Meja, we thought the slavers had taken you.”  
  
“Oh—no, Mama, Papa,” she said, looking up at him. She had grown since last they saw her, but she still took after her mother, small, slight. “They… they did take me.”  
  
Was that what they thought? They must have. She only wanted them to see the nice places in Ketterdam. She wanted to spare them her pain. As a result, she showed them a world in which she was comfortable and free. What choice were they left but to believe she wanted to stay?  
  
What choice was _she_ left but the truth?  
  
“Until recently, I worked for a gang,” Inej said. “They bought my indenture. I spied for them. I stole secrets. I… hurt people.”  
  
Months and years imagining her parents by her side. Now here they were, and she wished she had—of all people—Wylan. Sweet, nervous little Wylan was her last choice in any fight, on any mission, but he would sit with her now and hold her hand like he’d offered. He was right that Jesper would do the same, even though Jesper had spoken with Colm alone in the Geldrenner. No one had offered to sit with him. She had no doubt that, were he here, Jesper would try to lighten the mood or distract her from her miseries. As for Kaz, he would mock her until she was too angry with him to really hurt. Wylan wouldn’t fight the misery at all. He would face it with her.  
  
It was a fair misery for what she had done.  
  
Her voice shook as she said it: “I killed people.”  
  
She thought she was ready to face this, but the look on her parents’ faces was seared into her mind. For the first time, they looked at her like a daughter they had never known.  
  
“Kaz was a member of the gang. He convinced his boss to buy my indenture. He bought it from a pleasure house.”  
  
It took more courage than Inej knew she had to look at her parents. They looked deeply confused.  
  
“Pleasure house?” her mama repeated.  
  
They spoke little Kerch, only enough for a very basic conversation. Not knowing what to call it in Suli, she had translated directly. Saying it once had been bad enough, _implying_ had been bad enough. The details rushed through her head and she couldn’t say them out loud, bad enough her parents would know how her body had been violated, she couldn’t bear to tell them how her culture— _their_ culture had been used to humiliate her.  
  
Inej began to cry a very different set of tears from the ones she shed earlier. She slid from the bed to the floor, resting her head in her mama’s lap. She didn’t know what to say. Her thoughts were memories and ideas, they had stopped being words, tinged to heartbreak by the faint scent of rosemary.  
  
She prayed not to be pushed away for the things she had done.  
  
Her mama cried out and Inej knew she understood now.  
  
“Meja… my baby, my baby…”  
  
Any other time, Inej would have ached for her mama’s discomfort. Now, it simply seemed right. She wept while her mama stroked her hair and her papa sang her a lullaby she hadn’t heard since she was a child. She had been too old for that when they took her. She was young enough now.  
  
When she was too exhausted even to weep, Inej stumbled to her feet, her legs as unfamiliar as a fawn’s. Her grace was lost to her now. She didn’t know what she meant to do now. Graceless and lost, she stood before her mama and papa and tried to remember who she was.  
  
Her papa said, “Stay, Inej,” and she didn’t need to be told twice.  
  
She laid down on the bed. Her mama laid beside her. Inej did not have Kaz’s aversion to all touch, but she liked her space… usually. Tonight she did not want space, not from her parents. Not from people with whom she felt nothing but safe.  
  
Her mama stroked her face.  
  
“Do you know what I said the day you were born?”  
  
Inej did.  
  
“No, Mama.”  
  
“She said we weren’t having any more children,” Inej’s papa said.  
  
Her mama called him hopeless, which made Inej smile. She missed this so much. She missed every day, she missed the bickering and the comfort they all felt together.  
  
“That is what you said, my love.”  
  
“I said we would never want another child,” her mama said, “because I knew our daughter was perfect.”  
  
“Mama,” Inej objected, blinking away tears. For all the times she heard this story before, it had never made her cry. It made her cry now, when she felt all cried out.  
  
“Always so perfect,” her mama said.  
  
Inej wanted to say, except when she crossed a line her parents hadn’t thought she was ready for. She wanted to say that she had been a show-off (though was that really a sin for a performer?) and a thief.  
  
She _wanted_ to—but she knew her mama’s “no time to argue” tone.  
  
Especially when she added, “Always my daughter.”  
  
That night Inej slept like a child, between her mama and papa, soothed into dreams by gentle reminders of how much they loved her.

**Author's Note:**

> Inej is difficult for me to write and I hope she came across well and canonically. 
> 
> I actually wrote two versions of this story, I wrote a variant where Inej told her parents all of this while holding her tears in, and I realized that is a TERRIBLE idea. That’s entirely missing the point. Inej deserves to feel safe enough to acknowledge her feelings. She deserves to feel loved so unconditionally she can share the things that shame her the most. And I just love the murder babies so much and I want to see them all cry and be safe and cuddled by people they love (I’m soft).
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
